Interview with SerB

– Is there anything in WoT that you want to improve?
S.B.: Well, we would’ve set up the branches differently and change some mechanics, but wouldn’t change the big picture: sessions of games, wartime vehicles. After the release of WoT only lazy ones didn’t jump up on the train.

– You oftentimes talk on livejournal about the “Bovington grass” which serves as an inspiration. We understand that it’s connected to the Tank Museum, but after all – what exactly is it?
S.B.: In a narrow sense, it’s the development of tanks by British engineers, in a wider one – all weird tank constructions. All nations had some of them, the Germans and we as well.

– Each year, a new nation comes to WoT. How many years will it take for you to drop this rule, since there won’t be any nations left?
S.B.: Soon, the Swedish tanks will arrive. There are also the Italians, which have quite formidable low- and mid-tier vehicles, but have problems with top tiers. There are some prequisites for Poland, but it’s not easy since the Poles were basically out of the war from 1939 and couldn’t properly create something on their own. There are interesting projects there, but we don’t want to stuff up with clones of Soviet vehicles. We’re trying to find something interesting and are searching through archives. What else? Well, maybe we’ll compose an Israeli tree. But there’s this problem – they only have one really original tank, the Merkava, and it’s too advanced for WoT. So we would have to take some early prototype. All other vehicles are modifications of foreign vehicles or clones. The amount of nations is of course limited, but there are many interesting tanks which are not in the game. Soviet ones, material sent by the Chinese. There is also my favourite Argentinian tank which I really want to see in the game.

– What do you like about it?
S.B.: Well, he has a really great name – “Nahuel” [TN: “na hui/huj” means “fuck off” in Russian]. I think our players will like it.

– After the release of WoWS you wanted to try out the hypothesis of the equal status of USSR and Imperial Russia in the minds of the players. Did this work out?
S.B.: Not quite yet, since the Russian-Soviet BB line isn’t released yet, but I can say that Russian and Soviet cruisers and destroyers have somewhat equal status. So they’re liked for their characteristics, not for being Russian or Soviet.

– Why do you think WoWP and WoWS are not as popular as WoT?
S.B.: WoWP simply didn’t turn out well. With WoWS, the situation is more difficult. In Russia, it didn’t manage to grab the attention away from Tanks, but in Asia, for example, it goes really well. We’re even struggling to compete with WoT ourselves. Each new project on the Russian market should offer the “tanksmen” more than WoT. In a gameplay sense, WoWS couldn’t do that, but WoWS is a working and profitable project. We hope to improve it after all. I’ll be in Petersburg later today, working on it.

– Currently, several companies are trying to develop the “tanks” topic, but all are from the former USSR. Why do you think Blizzard or EA aren’t trying to develop something, since “Tanks” are everywhere?
S.B.: Well, one of the games is developed by Obsidian, but published by a Russian company. And aside from us, maybe the Germans could do something. For the Americans, WWII consists more of the Pacific ocean and the fleet. Of course they, as well as the English, Italians participated in land warfare, but only we and the Germans were really serious about the use of armour. The thing is that the Germans don’t like to remember all of this. When we inquired in one of the automobile factories who produced tanks in WWII, asking to access the archives, they declined. They said it like: “We stand for peace all over the world, please go your way”.
At the same time I don’t rule out the possibility of USA or Japan making such a game. We all remember the Japanese tank simulator Panzer Front. There was the fantasy tank E-79 with a crew of gnomes: a normal person wouldn’t fit in such a thing. But it looked interesting! We kinda wanted to buy a license and inplement the tank in the game. But only kinda.

What a pathetic sentence…
Sounds like they are actually scared of their past.
Well let me tell you something my fellow germans Porsche built tanks MAN built tanks and so on.
You cannot hide that, there is no point in trying you damn cowards…

Nah, the shoe doesn’t fit Woras. I’m a german, and one of the many things that piss me off about “my” land is this colossal brain damaged megatrauma about WW2 that everybody and his cat is living here – Bloodsnake is quite correct, although “pathetic” is far to kind of a word to describe it, imho.

It’s was what caused this bullshit that we call now the “Sommermärchen 2015”. Lots and lots of totally braindead idiots (including the thing that’s called “Merkel”) who scream “Come to us” to all the economic refugees in the world to do some horrible twisted form of penance for deeds done by people who are all dead by now (expect for maybe one or two ancient wrecks). It caused the recent refugee crisis in europe, destabilized the european union, caused costs in the billlions and opened pandoras box in germany, as we had massive integration problems before (turkish people who still can’t speak a single german sentence despite living here for years for example) which will get A LOT worse with all the asylum slums they created all over the place. This in turn causes all the right-wing extremist roaches to come out of their hiding holes, who flock around the AfD which is another inbound castrophe who could destabilize things even more… and it makes me fear that this land will relive some form of nazi germany in 20 years or so, it certainly goes south enough right now for it to happen.

*sigh* Sorry about the big off topic rant. I was teached that we should learn from the mistakes made in the past, and when i look around, nobody here did even remotely. They all squawk like brainless parrots about how terrible it was back then, but nobody thinks about how and why it happened…

Exactly! And that isn’t the only paralell, sadly… Take the poor integration of migrants (which can’t be questioned of course, since the penance parrots denounce you loudly as a nazi before you even manage to finish that sentence), add the binary amobea level thinking, add some hate and fear mongering, and you have the things that caused (imho) the massmurder on the jews….And it’s happening again. A bit different, but all the same nevertheless… and it scares me, quite honestly.

Yeah i can understand that you don´t want to relive that but if you try to achieve that you should not try to bury anything that has to do with it…
Has not worked before and is very unlikely to work in the future.

It pretty much is the sole reason, imho. I’ve already said above that everybody and his cat here is living this weird collective megatrauma, and, for some reason, act like they were responsible personally. I never got that, and it gives my an aneurism when i try to think about the reasoning behind this pathetic guilt scenario. If it would at least have some positive effect, but it doesn’t. WW2 is basically tainted knowledge, everybody got it hammered into the skull during school (im my case by two very brain damaged teachers who both acted like we were all fed with the blood of jews during our infancy and tried everything in their might to make us feel guilty), but aside from some stupid fact learning (like the exact date and time when WW2 started and stopped, totally useless information, at least for me), the surface of the reasons behinde the war were never even scratched. Even speaking of WW2 is… demanding, as you have do double check every word and sentence, or the penance parrots will rip you a new one (NAZI!), so trying to talk about the reasons is pretty much impossble. Heck, the fucking conditioning forces me even here to double check, while still leaving this uneasy feeling, and let me tell you, it SUCKS BIG TIME.

You know what? The war is a joke. It was started for Poland, yet Poland fell in Soviet hands… I believe Germany stopped the USSR from invading all of Europe by attacking first (also having americans liberate France, Italy). Soviets were already planning to attack Germany, they are just as evil, and I think that they would have not stopped there and try to „liberate” the rest of free Europe.. My 2 cents.

None of that even matters in any way.
A girl got raped by immigrants in Germany, and did not report it. Why?
She was scared that it would get the immigrants in trouble.
If there is a nazi in this story, the girl is not it.

Hmmm. The USSR waiting for germany to fight it out and then roll in (or in case germany didn’t started the whole thing, do it themselves) is something that fits nicely.

The joke for me however was how Hitler leashed out at everyone and everything like an angry small child. He took the battle to too many fronts, took too much land way too quickly and spread his forces too thin which broke his back in the end. Luckily, i might add, i don’t want to imagine a world where nazi germany succeeded…

In the end, the war had the best outcome possible i think.

It still gives me the chills how a land as small as germany could wreak so much havoc, and how much it took to stop them. They also were technological leaders in many way (take rockets, or the horten flying wings) and advanced their tech like crazy – It shows how much mankind can achieve if everybody works together for the same goal, as twisted and horrible these goals were. And i wish we could do something like that again – Without all the hate and all the killing, with peaceful goals that benefits humanity as a whole. But that will never happen, humanity isn’t built that way it seems. *sigh*

More like pouring sulfuric acid over the whole thing in an attempt to cauterize everything that was connected to WW2, like the national identity.

Which we now only have when the goddamn fucking football world cup is happening. THEN all these stupid morons are suddenly proud germans, draping their goddamn flags over everything, and when this whole pointless overmonetarized shit event is over, it all disappears in a day. UGH!

Bottom line is this:
WoT has to introduce every single possible tank that was even drawn on a paper napkin within the timeframe that is currently in game.
Nothing past the early 70’s.

If they do not, then the game has no where to grow. All that can happen is further optimizations that should happen regardless of addition to the tech trees.
Maybe even a consideration should be made to create a rest of the world tech tree, in which crews are mercenaries, and then can be changed from Italian to Polish to Argentinian to Egyptian to Israeli to Whatever.
1 country only has tiers 1-5? Another has higher tiers? STACK EM UP.